But there are two issues here. A weapon and a person who is not thinking rationally.
Guns are usually only dangerous when they are in the hands of someone who’s judgement is insufficient or impaired. I think that’s a significant issue. As noted, the shooter must not have been “quite right.” Was the gun the problem or was the shooter’s brain chemistry the problem?
I would much rather the focus be on spending money to help people be healthy and less dangerous to themselves or others along with workable and rational gun control. Guns by themselves aren’t dangerous.
Guns don’t “go off” without some help. That moron pointed his gun at his son and pulled the trigger. More likely than not, he didn’t mean to do either. Regardless, he pulled the trigger and killed his son. As a gun owner and a father of 11 and 6 year old sons I want nothing less than the complete force of law brought down upon this chuckle head to serve as an example of piss poor gun safety and it’s tragic results.
But was he not thinking rationally? I just think it’s too simplistic to think in categorical terms like rational/not rational or mentally ill versus not mentally ill.
The problem is not guns. The problem is people. People in general are just not able to handle guns without tragic consequences. I’m sure the guy in the linked story, which was on my mind before the tragedy in CT, would say exactly the same as every other gun owner. He’s super safe and it’s other idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. As would have Ms. Lanza in CT.
I think the problem (if there is a problem) with viewing this from the person side rather than the gun side is that people are a lot more complex and complicated than a gun is. Knowing if a gun exists tends to be easier than knowing if person has a mental illness.
And what if they do? We cannot eliminate crazy people. It may be difficult to eliminate guns, and perhaps functionally impossible, but they are still just items. They aren’t people. Eliminating an item generally shouldn’t cause the same emotional reaction as eliminating a person, or just putting the person in the equivalent of prison, or forcing the person to take medication. I realize that guns DO engender out-of-proportion emotional reactions, but I don’t think that makes all the problems with mental health interventions go away.
I haven’t been reading most of the threads this time around, but it was common in earlier threads about gun control for the pro gun rights side to call out the anti gun rights side when the antis talked about automatic weapons. Automatic weapons, the pro side would say, are heavily regulated, rare, and rarely used in crime. That seems to point to an understanding by both sides that availability of weapons affects how often they are used (which is obvious, but it seems like it needs to be made).
Do we have anything similar that points to even significant mental health interventions on a large scale affecting what crimes happen? Can we, for example, say that the invention of Prozac seems to have had an impact on the number of serial killers (to pick something rather at random)? We can show that regulating an item can reduce the item’s prevalence in crimes. Can we show that regulating people’s mental health can reduce their likelihood to commit crimes?
I was listening to a guy on NPR the other day who strongly objected to people like these shooters just being slapped with a “mentally ill” label so that people had a box to put them in. I don’t know if he’s right about this shooter, but it does seem easy to just say, “Oh, crazy person is crazy. The problem is crazy people!”
I don’t know if I’d say “people in general” can’t handle guns. I would say that people really REALLY don’t understand risk and are poor judges of their own competence.
I would also say that there is no way having guns around all day every day has no impact on a person’s thinking. We’re all greatly influenced by our environments. The study that would be interesting to me is what do people who are around guns all the time turn to when they need a problem solver, and is it different for people who are not around guns all the time? I would guess that it is, just based on my experience with other tools and things I have been habituated to use. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you use hammers every day, more things look like nails than would otherwise. If you don’t have a hammer…
Some guns are poorly designed enough that a simple bump can make them fire; I recall reading of one Chinese made rifle that would sometimes fire off a three round burst if jarred. Naturally, the NRA opposes regulations that ban such unreliable weapons.
Do you have a cite for this? Most gun owners are very concerned about this type of thing, because if nothing else they don’t want to get shot whenever they bump their own damn guns.
I seem to recall that the Mythbusters took this one on(I think it was a Russian pattern rifle, but I’m sure the Chinese copied it)…and the result was it was busted. Still, if you have a cite I’d be interested. Not that it really matters, since most guns won’t go off if you just breath on them or look at them funny. Possibly if you drop them, but again I seem to recall the Mythbusters tested a Mac 10 for that, and again it was busted.
Yet, if this is true why is the incidence of injury or death from guns so relatively low, especially if we take out suicide and intentional murder…neither of which is about people being unable to handle weapons, but instead about people willing to commit a crime or wanting self destruction. He’ll. even adding those things in, the incidence of gun violence from any source is pretty low, considering the huge numbers of guns and gun owners out there. How do you reconcile this with your people are the problem theory?
It’s an indisputable fact that this could happen to the C1 SMG. There were a couple of famous incidents in Canada. What a peice of shit that weapon was.
Well, if the NRA really did oppose a ban or recall on this gun, then I will be the first to admit they had their heads up their asses.
I suspect more likely is that they opposed some broader law that included this ban but was otherwise unacceptable, e.g. “All guns sold in the US must be federally tested for trigger safety, and if the BATF hasn’t gotten around to testing your model of gun yet, you can’t use it until they do.”
I haven’t found a reference to it either. Apparently Canada has much stronger laws protecting the names of juvenile offenders. I also found references to lock downs of classroom, but nothing about a law. I did find references to copycats, which is another reason to limit publicity.
I haven’t found a reference to it either. Apparently Canada has much stronger laws protecting the names of juvenile offenders. (Youth Criminal Justice Act) I also found references to lock downs of classroom, but nothing about a law. I did find references to copycats, which is another reason to limit publicity.
I’m quoting statistics from an editorial that appeared in my local newspaper today citing the investigative magazine “MotherJones.”
In a study of sixty-one mass murders thirty-five of the killers commited suicide on the scene, seven died in police shootouts regarded as “suicide by cop” and at least thirty-eight displayed signs of mental health problems prior to the killings.
The others? What do I suppose? I’ll bet in retrospect many people recognized that something was amiss and wrote it off for fear of offending or angering the person or some other reason. Perhaps not enough knowledge of what “crazy” looks like.
Do we know if more attention to their mental health may have prevented the crime? Not yet. Mainly because we haven’t focussed there. We have spent our money on physical health problems.
There are a number of reasons for that that I won’t go into here but I do want to address your comments about categorizing people or the facility of calling people crazy. And that is that we have made little progress in destigmatizing mental illness.
If a person is, indeed, mentally ill he deserves a correct (as possible) diagnosis and treatment and there should be no shame in that. We’ve made progress with tuberculosis and then cancer and people have come out of the closet with those illnesses. But it can still jeopardize a person’s job, friendships and credibility to own a mental illness.
And often when we see it, we take it lightly, as though calling the shooter mentally ill is “too easy” a way out of explaining his behavior. That was a very strange thing for the radio announcer to say. Guess I’d have to hear it in context.
Please do strongly advocate for greater funding for mental health funding and access to services. As a solution to mass murder, though, it’s just a distraction.
Well, Hentor, so is the focus on prohibition of guns or alcohol. There is no single solution yet we seem to want to argue from a single point.
Don’t you think it’s a combination of factors and that people need to work in agreement with each other from various perspectives to help alleviate it?
As I mentioned earlier I think recognition and treatment of mental health issues along with a reasonable gun control approach makes sense.